We present Ignite. The attempt is to take a number pressing social issues that our country faces, issue related to education, healthcare, agriculture, etc, and create 70 workable ideas to address them in a sustainable, original and innovative manner. You can be a part of the initiative by contributing to the ideas.

We will be adding more than a dozen new ideas everyday for the next five days.

Ignite is part of Ashwamedha the flagship event of ahvan ‘09. Ashwamedha is the hunt for the finest leader from among the top B-Schools of India.

Visit Ignite-Ashwamedha

The phone rang and it jolted me out of my state of fanciful musing. I looked at the name of the caller. “Ohh……my good ol’ pal from yesteryears…”. The conversation started of with the usual ‘wassup’ bit, and then I told him that I was working for Ahvan. “And what is that? I thought your management fest was called IRIS!”, said he. And then I told him how IRIS had transformed to ‘Ahvan – a call to the nation’ this year. “Oh! So you are working for Ashwamedha are you?!” came the question from the other side. “You know Ashwamedha do you?!” was my surprised reply to the question. And then he told me how every Indian MBA worth his salt has dreamt of being ‘the one’ at Ashwamedha for the last seven years of Ashwa’s existence.

For an event enjoying popularity of that magnitude, Ashwa started out as a brand new concept and has become a trendsetter, pioneering a whole new genre of events across B-Schools. Obviously, the event team is not talking about what it plans to do this year since they re-invent themselves every year. All they say about Ashwa is that ‘The event places the participants in a series of simulated real life scenarios where the participants have to use all their wits, knowledge and passion to prove their mettle.’

The event will be launched on the 24^th of October with prize money of Rs.150000 (tentatively). The initial elimination process of online rounds will bring down the numbers from 1000+ applicants to ‘30 potential winners’. From then on, each one watches the others’ moves and out of this stiff competition, emerges the winner. Meanwhile, sponsors are vying for Ashwamedha, jostling for the eyeballs that Ashwa grabs. The buzz on the campus is that Ashwa in its new avatar is going to be one of Ahvan’s biggest successes. The personal interview round which promises to be nothing short of dramatic will decide ‘the real leader’. The focus is primarily going to be Ahvan’s theme ‘Imagining India’, where we look for leadership that is not restricted to corporate houses but makes a meaningful difference to this nation.

The past few days have been quite dull for the Ashwa team. The junior team selections that were planned for last week had to put off due to scheduling problems (I was rather looking forward to the chance of ordering people around). Also we had hoped to start the hunting process for the judges of Ashwa ‘09, but even that got delayed. All in all there are not too many updates to write about. I’ll instead use this space to talk about the posters that we’ve put out so far.

Posters have always been an important communication medium for Ashwa. The posters for the event over the years have always communicated a simple message: There is only one winner. This has been the guiding principle for developing all creative content related to the event. This year we started working on the posters quite early. The plan was to have a good pool of posters ready when we have to send them out to other B-Schools and also to generate some buzz within the campus.

This was the very first poster we put up. It was conceived as a teaser poster. With that aim the design was kept as simple as possible, using only the text for effect. The poster was made pretty much in one sitting with Nachiket and Srinath coming up with the excuses and me putting them in as fast as possible.

The poster started off as a very serious poster that was supposed to impress and inspire the audience. However after a few excuses we ran out of things to say that did not sound cliched. So we decided to take the easy way out and make it lighter in tone with some subtle and some not-so-subtle digs at people. In hindsight, it was a great idea to make it lighter because the response to this poster was amazing. The phenomenal number of nominations that we received for the junior team could be attributed in part to the success of this poster. This poster most probably would be sent out to other B-Schools at a later date with some changes to replace the IIM I insider references.

This is the poster that has been taking ages to get printed. This was planned as our recruitment poster for the junior team. We wanted to put it up before starting the selection process. However printing delays and paper shortages at the IT Dept has pushed back the poster’s launch. Hopefully (fingers crossed) we’d be able to get it printed today. The good thing is that since the selection process has also been postponed we might just make it in time.

This one is a purely internal poster. The idea was to represent what qualities are required to be part of the Ashwa team. Again we started out with the aim of making a serious poster and ended up taking liberal potshots at our senior team! (I think we should stop trying for serious posters altogether) We’d however like to place on record that all five of our seniors are Grade-A chappies. It was a wonderful experience working with them on Ashwa ‘08.

The response to this poster has been entirely restricted to the web till now, but even that has been very encouraging. The content writing took a long time with long discussions over mails on which is the best way to convey Raj’s fascination with Zingaro. We are also thinking about a poster that showcases the past winners of Ashwamedha but that’s just a idea at this point.

What do you think about our posters? Good, bad or downright ugly? Let us know by dropping off a comment below!